Did anything sway WWCW from Trump in 2018? Did they ever vote for a female Dem? I’m looking for numbers. My suspicion is WWCW want a male presidential candidate (more than white, male). They are the deciders.

We need to weaken Murdoch media. Ideally destroy it. That means Fox and WSJ. NEVER subscribe to WSJ and don’t tweet WSJ. Don’t stay at hotels that play Fox. Don’t go to the gyms. Complain at airports.

“The universe has created an observer and now, in an act of quantum measurement, the observer looks back and creates the universe.”
— Read on www.kateva.org/sh/

Something like this I think. But not a full Boltzmann brain. More like the origins of life on earth. A small fluctuation of quantum foam that does a local measure. The Planck unit of measurement, or pmeasure. That propagates, and in no-time at all we have a slice of universe. Bit like every stone block holds every sculpture.

Gruber: “while editing text you can 3D Touch on the keyboard to turn it into a trackpad for moving the insertion point around. iOS 12 introduced a feature where you can get into this mode without 3D Touch by tapping and holding on the space bar“

Outlook views are beautiful. Discovered recently that in a high volume environment of rapidly changing priorities and tasks that ‘last modified’ is a surprisingly useful way to view my tasks. More than priority or Due Date.

… as in all of molecular biology, closer inspection not only reveals a wealth of impressive detail, but huge numbers of things which do not so much appear to have been carefully crafted by a divine hand, as much as assembled by a blind lunatic with infinite time, infinite willingness to tinker (and a correspondingly infinite willingness to accept whatever works as soon as it does), and infinite supplies of duct tape, super glue, and baling wire. What’s more, the whole mechanism keeps falling apart over time in subtle (and not so subtle) ways, which just leads to casual repurposing of the altered pieces.

I learned how this happens by analyzing 19th century freight train breaking systems when I was 17.

Wiles proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem borrowed from from algebraic geometry and number theory (Wikipedia). Presumably these are equivalent representations for some problems. I imagine this as the grown-up equivalent of switching from Cartesian to polar coordinates to solve a freshman physics problem.

I wonder when AI will start exploring math-space, searching for more of these unexpected alignments and concordances.

It feels like that might happen soon, but I have no idea how it would work.

Update: from the Wikipedia article on Wiles proof, a much better example of what I’m trying to describe:

You can still sort of export to iCloud photostreams as long as you don’t try simultaneously using Photos.app. I don’t recommend this though, I think it’s crashy under Sierra. I’ve seen photostreams obliterated and thousands of thumbnails scattered across an Aperture database.

Probably the only ‘safe/sane’ photo sharing from Aperture now is export images/video to the file system then use an uploader This is semi-automatic with a Google Drive folder that supports Google Photos. (Though I quite dislike Google Photos because you can’t specify an album destination during upload.)

I do miss the glory days of photo sharing.

I’m mildly curious to see if Apple will introduce shared Libraries and Library Management for Photos.app. What a disappointment that product has been.

On a cellular level, what stimulates your chondrocytes, the stem cells that grow new cartilage, is cyclical loading. It’s a pattern of force that’s associated with things like running, jumping or weight lifting. These cells aren’t stimulated in the same way by lower-impact activities like using an elliptical machine or cycling.

For cartilage to remain healthy and regenerate in the way that it does for someone who is in their teens or 20s, the preponderance of evidence suggests that cyclical loading in the form of running or weight lifting is a really effective way to do that.

To a physician of my age this is like treating asthma with smoking.

It does match my experience though. When my familial arthritis kicked in I thought my CrossFit days were done. Instead my knees feel better when I’m doing my wall balls and back squats…

I’ve lived through several OS transitions. Microsoft did them best. Their transitions had the lowest expenses and the least data loss. Apple did the biggest transition. OS/2 and GEOS died.

We all expect another transition from Apple; some mixture of macOS and CPU transition. This follows on years of Apple macOS disappointments — for me, above all, the way Apple ended Aperture.

I expect this transition to go badly for me. So my Apple relationship is officially cold. Not divorce yet, but the lawyer is in Contacts.

I’m not buying anything from Apple unless there is very clear immediate value and a clear exit strategy. I’ve ended our family Apple Music subscription. I’ll look for an alternative to iTunes movies. No earPods, no Apple Watch.

I’m staying on Sierra and Aperture through 2019.

Divorce will be painful, but Apple is likely past redemption. Its path lies elsewhere.

Google Maps wouldn’t let me switch from bike to drive directions. App state was confused, the left most icon inaccessible.

So I switched from bike to walk. That reset the app state and made drive accessible.

A routine bug workaround. In the iOS 11 era we run into this sort of thing a few times a day. Barely notice them any more.

There are so many bugs. Apple has the most now, but they are everywhere. The bike share I used this morning has a 15 sec delay in releasing a bike, if you don’t know that then you think the transaction failed. A bug equivalent.

If you are a global genius you may not notice these. If you merely have a knack, and are not yet too old, they are a minor annoyance. If you are an Old, as I am, they are ticks of the reapers clock, they take a bit longer to solve from year to year.

Ahh, but if you don’t have a knack … you didn’t get the academic gene, didn’t go to college, didn’t get the orthogonal geek gene … then this might be Hell. A regular reminder that you are not Elite. That the world has moved on and left you behind. That what you have, what you can do, what you have done … it doesn’t count any more.

3. Ads on kitten videos and white-nationalism and “viral content” got more clicks.

4. The algorithms encoded this knowledge and began tailoring content based on interest “hints”.

Lately researchers have been quantifying this. They found emotionally engaging content drives more clicks, and it is easier to invent that content than it is to find it. So the mass web became a tool for disseminating false content.

The effect is so powerful non-researchers see it in simple YouTube tests, aided in this case by a disaffected Google engineer:

Basically the dark side of humanity is amplified by Pay-per-click advertising business models.

The good news is there are obvious fixes. The same fixes used for other addictive social harms like tobacco. Regulation and taxes. For example, tax click-based ad revenue heavily.

Twenty years later the dominant web authoring tool, WordPress, has no native table support.

I have never gotten a good explanation for the death of tables.

So I’ll venture a guess.

I think it was CSS. I wonder if it’s just too hard to put HTML’s table model together with CSS.

If this is true then my CSS dislike will double …

Update 2/19/2018: @clarkgoble creates his tables in Numbers then posts into MarsEdit (choose paste and preserve formatting!). I tried it and it works! I also installed the popular tables plugin for WordPress but it’s a poor substitute for native support. I wish MarsEdit did tables, but they didn’t make the recent big update.

Phone.app shows a “Favorites” list. The list includes phone number references of course, but it can also hold FaceTime audio (UI for adding FaceTime audio is obscure), FaceTime video, and Message references. Favorites only show in Phone.app, not in Messages.app or FaceTime.app.

Favorites should logically be its own app or a part of Contacts.app, not a part of Phone.app.

When, one day, a translation engine crafts an artistic novel in verse in English, using precise rhyming iambic tetrameter rich in wit, pathos, and sonic verve, then I’ll know it’s time for me to tip my hat and bow out.

Result:

One day, a translation engine used English poetry to create an artistic novel, with exquisite rhythms, rich wit, sadness, and sound, so I knew it was time to give me a little hat.

This is a real improvement over the last time I tried this. The “little hat” is goofy, but the result evokes a similar meaning.

It is a better result than I expected.

If I were writing for a Chinese audience, I could try this round-trip technique and tweak the English until it worked. Then have a native read the Chinese.

Our best guess is “bad luck”. Maybe they had another infection that interacted with influenza. Maybe their immune system was transiently disordered. Maybe they had an obscure genetic trait that set things down a bad path.

I’ve seen some long tortured explanations, but in this epidemic it seems bad luck. Sometimes lightning hits us.